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I'm not at all impressed. This honestly feels like Blizzard finally managed to admit to themselves that they screwed up massively by alienating dota straight into Valve's grubby hands, and now they want a slice of that delicious F2P MOBA pie. Blizzard's attempts to make WOW pvp an esport are a joke, and SC2 has dramatically lost in popularity to LoL (in no small part due to Riot's excellent management of their own esport's scene).

So this is their answer - and its not a good answer from what I've seen. In fact, this entire game would make an amusing case study in Riot HQ on how not to design a game. Part of LoL's success in the hotly contested MOBA genre can be directly attributed to Riot's clear stance on staying away from a high burden of knowledge. Every champion has very specific, iconic, flavorful, and telegraphed abilities. For new players, these champions are introduced in rolling waves in the F2P champion set each week. Champions like Nidallee, Jayce, Lee, and Elise push this concept about as far as Riot is probably going to take it, but they are all very obvious transitions (the transforming champions are very obvious, and Lee's secondary effects are either obvious Like Q, or not as powerful as the original ability was).

Heroes (terrible name, should have stuck with Storm as their short hand but I'm not a hero class developer~) has burden of knowledge problems out the ass. Each map has a different gimmick mechanic, which sucks. Each map has different physical layouts, which sucks even more for more advanced players. The coup de grace, however, is their hero skill design.

In the standard MOBA model, leveling up a character provides a base stat increase, and more power to abilities. The functionality of these abilities doesn't change, only their power. Enter Heroes, and now you have full friggen per-game talent trees that radically alters what a hero can and cannot do. Even if they had some visual way to telegraph that data reasonably (they don't), you would still need to learn the ENTIRE hero champion pool PLUS every single talent upgrade they have.

These aren't minor changes either. Raynor's ult can vary from a slow-moving, anti-tower ability with Hyperion, to a fuck-you duelist move with overhead Banshees that follow their target and provide vision in an area around them. How will you know which he has? You won't till he pulls it out. Rofl. Good luck deciding if you can take on a specific champion in a fight at any given moment when you can't even know what moves they have.

Even on a more basic level, their hero design makes me very, very nervous. Stiches has a blitzcrank style grab that, when upgraded, can go across the entire screen. This is in a game without a built in flash mechanic like LoL has. I really hope they have bans, cause that's the kind of shit that will stay 100% pick / ban. The whole game will probably devolve into an "everyone has OP abilities" fest.

So yea, this is Blizzard's desperate desire to get into the MOBA money. And you know what? I'm sure it will succeed. Blizzard is combining all their IP's into one roof, and each of those IP's have a very large fanbase all on their own. Throw in some decent skins to buy with $ and watch the cash flow in. I would be surprised if Blizzard even bothered trying to pretend this is e-sport worthy; they will probably put some token effort into it, but they have no interest in trying to compete with LoL's size. They don't want or care about giant finals events or a worldwide tournament bracket. They want skin and hero sales - lots and lots of sales.

Counterpoint: Blizzard has a long history of making non-terrible games. Pretty much every game they've made has set the standards for that genre, with the exception of Diablo 3. It looks like this may be overly ambitious, and perhaps they'll finally make a game that really sucks, but I'll give them some small chance of making something good based on their history, even if it doesn't look great right now.

For example, that added complexity of hero builds might be neat, even if it isn't noob-friendly. Using the Raynor example, one build will likely be better than the other, meaning most people will use it and it'll be predictable - but then the other build gains the advantage of surprise for the few people or situations that warrant it.